Jeremy Hunt’s Plan for the NHS

The Tories would have us believe that they are backing away from NHS privatisation. In fact, they’re stealthily laying the groundwork for maximum profit opportunities – and comprehensive healthcare may be their first casualty.

It would be nice to think so. The more naïve sections of the liberal media have certainly bought that idea. When Simon Stevens launched his “Five Year Plan” last year, Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer said he had “only one fundamental objection” to the “generally excellent” plan – that it had the wrong picture on the cover. Polly Toynbee in the Guardian told us it was great because “the word competition doesn’t appear once in his 37 page document”. Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham appeared to sort of welcome the Stevens plan, then to sort of welcome it not quite so much.

Aside from this site, one of the few mainstream commentators to nail what the Stevens’ plan was really about was Fraser Nelson, in the Telegraph. “Like the best revolutions, it came carefully disguised,” Nelson observes. Yes, “the c-word didn’t appear once” but (like Nelson himself) Stevens still “firmly believes” in the competition/choice agenda – he’s just experienced enough to know that “the secret of successful radical reform is not to announce it with any fanfare.”

Nelson nails it when he says: “Stevens’ Grand Plan is to have no more Grand Plans but, instead, lots of smaller plans.”

So what are these smaller plans – and what do they mean for the future of the NHS?

Whilst even Jeremy Hunt and his regulator Monitor have tacitly admitted that standalone, competing Foundation Trusts aren’t working, Hunt and Stevens see more privatisation, not less, as the answer.

As Circle have found in the UK with their disastrous Hinchingbrooke foray, at the moment it’s hard to make a profit from competing to provide full service local hospitals.

As United Health, Kaiser and others have found in the U.S. – profit opportunities are much bigger if you integrate both the purchasing and provisionof healthcare under private control or influence, enabling you to ration or deny more expensive healthcare interventions. And it’s much easier to do that if you use your control or influence to reorganise provision away from full service local hospitals, towards a chain of disparate community-based clinics and far-flung specialist centres. Of course you have to claim all the while that this is all about integration, prevention, empowerment, localism, personalisation, specialisation, reducing ‘variation’, and ‘care closer to home’.

Profit opportunities also expand if firms set their own easily-gamed ‘outcome based’ success measurements. Out go what Stevens calls ‘mechanistic’measurements (like the requirement to have enough nurses, properly trained healthcare workers, and hospital beds).

And there are many other attempts underway to undermine the comprehensive, universal, publicly funded core values of the NHS, by bringing the ‘undeserving’ narrative from benefits, into the NHS. An early sign is the attempt to refuse people care if they smoke or are obese, for example (cavalier to the fact that it is poorer people who will be disproportionately hit by such clinically uninformed decisions). Whilst Devon’s attempt to do this failed, experts saw it as a sign of things to come.

Stevens has just given all of this a big boost by pushing integrated health and social care budgets (and indeed integrated benefits budgets in some devolved areas, like Cornwall). All of this may be nice in theory, perhaps, but it’s pretty terrifying in a climate of ‘austerity’, where social care users already can, and have to, top-up or co-pay for services (and benefits are already heavily conditional).

And integrated personal budgets – which Stevens has been pushing since day one in the job – are now being rolled out to millions. No-one has yet managed to explain how these are any different from the old Thatcherite voucher plan (which would basically finish the job of destroying the NHS).

Lastly, as a big bonus, once firms nabbing all these contracts have their hands on the patient data needed to commission healthcare (or obtained by delivering it ‘digitally’), they can also make a packet selling our information to data, insurance and pharmaceutical companies – or worse.

So if that’s the Stevens plan, what’s our plan B to get out of this mess?

First, the NHS urgently needs a cash injection to get it through this current manufactured crisis (with the DoH handing billions back to the Treasury in ‘underspends‘ in recent years – ‘doh!’ indeed!).

Healthcare needs are not a bottomless pit, as the neoliberal ideologues claim – but the demands of health, insurance, pharmaceutical, data, consultancy and tech companies for profit streams, may well be.

Ultimately, all this destruction is possible, not because of Stevens himself, but because the Coalition government finally removed the duty to secure comprehensive healthcare which was offered to the nation in 1948 and persisted, just about, til 2012. We need to restore that duty.

And we need to recognise that hospitals have been brought low by a combination of PFI debt and the dog eat dog, beggar my neighbour nightmare of even the ‘internal’ market, let alone the external one. We need to get rid of that market – as Scotland has done.

The NHS Bill – sponsored by Caroline Lucas, signed by Jeremy Corbyn when he was a backbencher, and due for its second reading in March 2016 – is a serious attempt to do both.

The market, internal or external, disguised as ‘collaboration’ or not, is not an effective way to allocate healthcare – we’ve known that since the pioneering work of Nobel prize winner Kenneth Arrow in the 1960s. It forces hospitals to hammer down staff costs and offload unprofitable patients, and creates impossible choices between the bottom line and patient safety.

It’s only ideology and vested interests that would seek to persuade us that the answer is more of the same.

And if anyone – Tory, Labour, or ‘non-political’ – says they support the NHS, we need to ask – do you mean an NHS that is comprehensive, universal, publicly funded, high quality, timely and ethical?

If not, they are not defending the NHS as the public understand and love it. And that’s what we need to fight for.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. If you have any queries about republishing please contact us. Please check individual images for licensing details.